I’ve been testing out the new firmware for the Nook Color and thought I’d put together a video review showing the new features and Nook Appstore in action, along with some thoughts on the new firmware as a whole.

There are some good things about the new firmware and some bad. Check the dedicated Nook Color review page for the details, complete with plenty of screenshots and the aforementioned video review.

Nathan,
Have you updated your emulator so that it accesses the 2.2 android market?

I got access to the Android 1.5 market following the instructions from the blog post mentioned in the comment section. But I couldn’t follow what Dronksky was saying when you guys upgraded to the 2.0 market, so I couldn’t try to follow the same logic.

I got sick of messing with the emulator and deleted it. My brain is too clogged to handle all that technical information 🙂 I just use the SDK for taking screenshots anymore since Android makes it so difficult. Since the Xoom is my primary tablet, is has market anyway. I have a ROM on the Nook, which is a lot easier than messing with rooting. It doesn’t have full market access but partial. I’ve been using Amazon’s appstore more lately anyway. They are starting to get quite a few apps now and they make it so much easier than through the Android Market. I go there every day to get the free paid app. If they don’t have what I’m need then I go the Android Freeware or equivalent.

“I have a ROM on the Nook, which is a lot easier than messing with rooting.”

However if I understand the process, if you boot to that Rom (I assume off your Micro SD card) and download files, then you are not using the updated BN Android OS that has the optimized Flash, correct?

I guess once we have root access, we won’t necessarily have access to the Android Marketplace at first. However, once we have root access, we for sure have access to the Amazon.com marketplace. Is that correct? Thanks.

That is correct. However, they have ROMs for Android 2.2 and other variations so you get Flash with those as well. Video doesn’t work on the Honeycomb ROM however. But works on the others as far as I know. I hear good things about C7M. Think I’ll have to give it a try one of these days.

I got the emulator to access the 2.2 Android Market using that link about. However, the emulator apparently doesn’t have root access, so apparently I can’t access the apk files I downloaded, which was the whole point of doing this in the first place.

Apparently the adb tool that is executed in the bat file was moved to another directory with this lated JDK, so now I have to figured out how to update the PATH environment variable to include platform-tools/ directory, so you can I execute adb from any location.

Strange. I moved the batch file to the other directory and then ran it from a command line. It appears to have worked since I get a listing of the files pulled and it says in total 26 files were pulled, including some sdk files. However, I don’t see any of the actual files that were pulled. I did a search of the entire c drive for *.sdk but none found.

Well UPS delivered the refurbished Nook Color last night and I charged it up overnight and it worked fined until I test the ON-OFF button which doesn’t work. Looks like it is going back. I will probably just go and get the Samsumg Galaxy Tab instead so I don’t need to screw around with all of this.

Yeah, it worked the same way with the Archos 70. Holding 2 seconds or 15 seconds doesn’t turn it off. And the standby will work sporadically depending on where I am when I push the button. But no matter what I do, I can’t power it down.

That’s some bad luck. You want to get a 7″ device, right? The HTC Flyer is another one to keep an eye on. Actually, maybe not. It looks like it is going to be $499. I don’t know how these companies think they can compete with the likes of the iPad when they price their devices the same, despite having a smaller screen and less features. Makes no sense!

I picked up the Samsung Galaxy Tab wifi yesterday. I like it well enough, but it has some things I need to adjust to. For instance the multiple buttons tend to be accidentally brushed when holding it. Also, the default Safari browser doesn’t result in the reflow of text when you resize the text followed by a double tab. I had to reinstall a different browser for that functionality.

I think the 512k ram makes a big difference in performance compared to the Archos 70 with 256k.